Eduweb17: When Good Tweets Go Bad!
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When a crisis hits your institution, are you going to be ready for it? This my presentation and case study from the EduWeb17 Digital Summit!
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Eduweb17: When Good Tweets Go Bad!
- 1. WHEN GOOD TWEETS GO BAD Social Media in the Crisis Age Benson Hendrix Digital Media Manager New Mexico Tech @DESERTRONIN
- 21. VIDEO RESPONSE
- 24. –Ann Marie Van den Hurk, APR “The role of crisis communications is to protect and defend an organization facing a public challenge to its reputation.”
- 25. BE PREPARED • Practice in tabletop sessions in advance. • Practice for a variety of scenarios • Create a crisis playbook • Look at what other organizations do during a crisis • Volunteer to help out at other crises.
- 26. • Interruption of your organization’s services • e.g. Evergreen State College, UC Berkeley, • Natural disasters, campus threats. • These can involve shutting down campus services • PITA but doesn't stop you from doing your job • Mostly what we deal with in social media • Twitter-storm, Facebook messages, YouTube comments. • But pay attention • These can give you advance notice before an problem becomes a crisis CRISIS PROBLEM
- 27. HOW BAD IS IT?? • Level 1 - Minor • Usually just negative comments, tweets, etc. • Level 2 - Moderate • Negative rumors, activist campaigns, customer service issues • Level 3 - Major • Misconduct, active shooter, natural disasters, protests
- 29. ON THE CLOCK • What is going on? • When did it start? • Why did it happen? • Who is involved? • Where did it happen? • What are our options?
- 30. COORDINATING WITH PR, LEGAL, ETC. • Your PR team will be putting together a media response. • Take this and use it as the foundation for your own responses. • Run a handful of stock responses by PR and legal that are: • Direct, honest • Empathetic • Factual
- 31. YOUR GAMEPLAN • Is it a crisis or a problem? • Develop a list of FAQ’s and responses • How do you want to respond? • Establish a chain of command. • Who are your primary audiences? • Who is monitoring social media?
- 32. WHAT IS YOUR ROLE? • One of the first lines of information. • Media will be looking at your statements • Reputation management (institutional) • Engaging with stakeholders
- 36. ADVICE FOR STAFF & FACULTY • General: Be cool • Don’t censor criticism • Don’t respond on your own • This opens you up to attack. • Don’t be cute or snarky
- 37. DO’S • Be honest & transparent • Empathy & concern • Just share the facts • Say “No Comment”* • Don’t speculate • Don’t needlessly place blame • Don’t post from your personal account DONT’S
- 38. “Content on the University of New Mexico Facebook page and web sites that it links to may not reflect the views of the college. Comments and discussion may be moderated. Offensive comments (including, but not limited to, cursing, racist, sexist, homophobic, or anti-semitic statements) may be deleted, as will comments that insult, bully, threaten, harass, or libel. Users who post such comments may be removed, banned, and/or reported to Facebook. Posts including but not limited to commercial and promotional material that are not related to UNM, its students, or its community may be deleted, and the users who posted them removed and/or banned. Comments that are unrelated to the original post or link may be deleted. Repeated off-topic or promotional postings may result in a permanent ban from the page.”
- 39. THINGS TO REMEMBER • Pause any scheduled or promoted posts • Check your social media calendar for appropriateness of posts • Check your recent content for inappropriate comments • Measure positive vs. negative responses. • Coordinate messages and updates with PR, Legal, Execs, etc. • These become your posts/videos/etc.
- 40. • Factually assess the situation • Keep key leaders and stakeholders informed • Develop platform-appropriate responses, spokespeople • Move at the speed of social media
Editor's Notes
- So let’s start off with a quick visualization exercise. Imagine if you will it’s a beautiful weekend morning. The sun is peeking out behind the clouds, and maybe you have a relaxing day ahead of you. You sit back with your cup of coffee, but you can’t completely relax. Your Spidey Sense is tingling. There’s something scratching at the back of your mind.
- But you have a sense of foreboding. A dread that you can’t quite shake. That somewhere, out there, someone is doing something stupid on social media. And like any good social media professional you spring into action!
- And then you find it. The tweet, or the Facebook post, that someone rattled off probably without thinking. This is one that we had at UNM. You can tell he really meant what he said, because he added #truth at the end. That’s like the triple-dog dare of social media.
- As you can guess, the Internet responded with the usual calm and rational thought that its known for. And you already see the responses building up, people frustrated, upset, thankful they dropped out of community college rather than be associated with academia. People making sure we knew what was being said.
- And you react the only way you can. So I’m sure you can already figure out my first response. I contacted our Director of Marketing and Communication and told her what was happening. She asked me to keep an eye on things, and we weren’t planning on responding. So you can guess how that went. Fast Forward 18 hours - the scene, the interior of a conference room in the heart of Lobo Nation, the UNM College of Arts and Sciences. The players…
- The Chair of the Psychology Department
- The Dean of Arts and Sciences… This was taken just after going through his emails that morning.
- … The Communications team…
- … Representatives from the Provosts office…
- Of course, everyone’s favorite department, Legal… And rounding out the meeting,
- Schmucky the Facebook Clown. The first question we had was, “what the heck happened?” We discussed what was going on, looked over the stories that were currently being posted, the questions we were getting and what had been posted over the weekend.
- A number of media outlets were picking up the story, ranging from Inside Higher Ed to Jezebel, The Huffington Post, and others. Since NYU was the primary institution being named in these stories, we started working on our own response, and we wanted to see what NYU’s response was going to be.
- NYU responded, stating that the tweet was deleted and an apology was issued and that was it. As the day went on, they issued a couple of tweets clarifying the situation.
- While at first this had the familiar feeling of a bus and being thrown…
- I realized that this also gave us an opportunity. We were being handed the ball, now it was up to us to make the most of it. How were we going to address this? After a few minutes of brainstorming, I proposed that we tackle the issue head on. We were already getting phone calls, emails and tweets leveled at us about this, let’s explain what we are doing. Our message had to be balanced. On one hand we took what was said seriously and I was concerned with protecting the university’s image, and on the other hand, we also wanted to respect our faculty member’s rights. So we quickly released a statement, and convinced our Psychology chair to sit down for a quick video discussing the situation.
- First we released our statement. It was a pretty standard PR statement, but I wanted us to go a little further and really address the issue on social media, where it was taking place in real time. So after some back and forth discussion, we convinced the chair of the Psychology Department to sit down for a video interview we could send people to. I wanted us to give our message a human response.
- We released this video on YouTube, and it became the centerpiece of our social media response. It answered some of the main questions people were asking us, as well as telling them what our next steps would be. Our chair was also an expert on body image issues, and she was able to share her expertise. This video was used by news outlets around the world, from our local TV stations to higher ed news sites to stories in England. That was our end goal.
- We didn’t just publish our statement and video and leave it at that. We reached out to people on Twitter, linked back to our video interview, and reporters that were reaching out to us were also directed to the video. Because of this quick work, our Chair’s interview was included in a number of stories. Social media happens in real time, heck as we’ve seen it feels like it can happen faster than real time. And once we get our response together, we have to get back to our target audiences as quickly as possible. I was really happy with our response during this situation. We fought our natural tendency to want to shut down and not respond, we moved beyond just a statement with our own interview. It’s important to move beyond a no-comment statement if possible, because people expect more, especially as we move into what can only be called a social media crisis age.
- Because we are now living in the crisis age. When people get upset, they’re going to jump online and let everyone know. And then everyone is going to let us know, and we have to be prepared for it.
- Thanks to social media, crisis management has shifted to becoming more forthcoming and transparent, because that what the public expects. The days of issuing a “no comment” and walking away are not yet gone, but they are vanishing. And who do we need to reach out to and inform? How do we even get started?
- The first step in managing a crisis happens long before it actually happens. Take the time to sit down at a conference table with the various departments you are coordinating with and run through some practice scenarios. If there are protestors outside of your office door and people are blasting you with automated emails, how will you respond? How would you respond to just a social media issue? Each scenario is unique, but you can start to build the framework to respond in these sessions. Because how we react in a crisis situation is drastically different from our day to day operations.
- Crisis vs. problem This idea is something that social media crisis manager Anne Marie Van Den Hurk talks about. The difference between a crisis and a problem, or an annoyance. Once we determine which it is, we can ask ourselves…
- Level 1 - These tend to be a minor situation. They can be negative media stories, tweetstorms, comments, etc. These situations need to be monitored and responded to as necessary, since they can become Level 2 - These tend to be more sustained, requiring monitoring, outreach and responses. Level 3 - These are the major problems. They can either happen with no warning, or might occur if they are not attended to. These will often require your crisis team to meet or you to coordinate with other departments.
- Having a good monitoring program is often the first line of defense when a situation starts to form. It was because of my monitoring efforts on Twitter that we knew people were getting upset about something a professor said. It took me a minute to locate his tweet and find a couple of other angry responses and I was on the phone to the director just after that. She wanted me to keep track of what was being said, but not to respond to anyone at that time. While we didn’t respond then, I was able to jot some notes down that we built our engagement game plan on…
- At this point, you need to start analyzing the situation. The clock has already started and you need to get some questions answered ASAP. Take charge of the situation.
- Coordinating your efforts. You’re working as part of a team. You need to be working with PR and Legal to come up with not only the best possible response for the situation, but a response that will fulfill your responsibility to protect the university’s reputation. Our leaders understood the importance of getting out in front of this as much as possible, and we were able to create our video message and share it within 6 hours of that first meeting. By working with your team you can better prepare your game plan…
- This is the social media response assessment our office developed a number of years back. We based this off of the Air Force’s social media response matrix.
- Update Leadership When you’re monitoring social media, you can keep your boss and their bosses updated on the latest rumors, concerns, fears, and anger you are seeing about the situation. You have that information and you need to pass it up to your leadership.
- Be aware that you, your faculty, your regents, your institution will be under the microscope. Everything that is tweeted out will be scrutinized. People will scan back through years of someone’s tweets to find something that supports their argument. That’s why it’s really important to…
- … keep your cool. Nothing good ever comes from charging forth and calling out people who are criticizing your organization. We like the current clap-back view of social media, but when you’re in a crisis, you have to put the humor and snark on the back burner and deal with it in an earnest and empathetic way. You can always get back to the sarcasm later, once the crisis is over.
- There is an asterisk here, because there are a few topics that you can’t change people’s minds on, regardless of your response, and I would argue that in those situations it’s OK to not respond. Those areas are: Politics Religion Trolling
- It’s important to not censor criticism that is posted on your social media pages, however, it’s just as important to reinforce your school’s social media page policy. I know this is hard to read, don’t worry it’ll be on the presentation you can download. But this is the UNM Facebook page policy. We define what behavior is inappropriate and that if people violate that policy, those comments would be removed and people potentially banned. Don’t censor or ban people for criticism, because while it can sting, it can also be useful. But don’t be afraid to ban people who are being trolls.
- A crisis situation can be a really hectic time. And things could slip through the cracks. There are some things you want to keep in the front of your playbook to nudge your memory. You want to measure the positive and negative responses you’re getting. It’s easy for us to focus on the negative comments, but if we look at the ratio between positive reactions and negative reactions we might discover that our audience is more supportive than we think.
- When a problem or a crisis occurs, your team has a mission. You have to assess the situation in real time and report it back to the rest of the team.
- Remember this Too Shall Pass In the moment it might appear that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, much less that there is an end to the tunnel. You may be tempted to shut down all of your social media accounts, and run screaming into the mountains. Just keep telling yourself, this too shall pass. The Internet will move on to a new target. You’ll see residual comments and posts for a while, but the level of anger will dissipate.
- As for us. After a few days this did pass, and most of the responses we received from our critics turned out to be positive. They were happy that we addressed the issue. And at the end of the day,
- We were able to walk out of the office, feeling like social media superheroes…
- Any questions?